Deputy Who Faced Gun Barrel Cited for Valor : Law enforcement: A routine prowler call found Claudio Fabris face to face with a gunman. He acted decisively, and is awarded the Sheriff’s Department’s highest honor.

It was a quiet summer night in a Laguna Hills back yard when Sheriff’s Deputy Claudio Fabris first learned the tough lesson that there is no such thing as a routine call.

“Truth be told, I was getting pretty complacent,” said Fabris, a five-year member of the Sheriff’s Department who had been on patrol duty for 1 1/2 years.

But his aplomb developed through hundreds of uneventful calls was shattered July, 31, 1990. Face to face with a gun muzzle, Fabris made a split-second decision and fatally shot an armed prowler who had been terrorizing two women and a 4-year-old girl for more than three hours.

For his actions, Fabris, 33, was awarded Friday the Sheriff’s Department’s highest honor, the Medal of Valor.

“Everything that Claudio did was absolutely by the procedure,” Sheriff Brad Gates said.

Fabris is “a very sensitive human being and officer,” Gates said. “It was a very tough choice for him, and we’re glad that he made the right call, for the safety of himself and the people in that residence.”

Eleven other lieutenants, investigators and deputies from the Sheriff’s Department also received honors during the annual awards luncheon at the Westin South Coast Plaza. Winners were chosen by the Sheriff’s Advisory Council, an 800-member private group of business and community leaders. The 10-year-old council began the Medal of Valor ceremony in 1989.

“It was a very hard decision” choosing Fabris, said council president Buck Bean, a Santa Margarita Co. executive. “The difficulty was not recognizing all of them for what they do.”

Each recipient received an award for performing well under stress, investigating complicated crimes or developing programs aiding law enforcement.

Gates told an audience of 425 people from law enforcement, city government and business that the recipients all acted with “valor and courage.”

Fabris, born in Buenos Aires, said that when he joined the department he hoped that he would never have to use his gun.

“A lot of guys go through 20 years and never fire a weapon,” he said.

In a year and a half of South County patrol duty, Fabris said, he had never once encountered an armed person. Hundreds of prowler reports he investigated turned out to be nothing.

“It was usually wind or a possum,” Fabris said.

But the incident in the back yard of the home on La Suen Road was different.

Fabris and his partner came to the front door and took notes from Jackie Ruple, who was 3 1/2 months pregnant.

Ruple’s mother, Fern Aimo, and Ruple’s 4-year-old daughter had been listening to footsteps, knocks and other strange sounds outside for three hours. At one point they were startled to see a shadow that looked like a man trying to unlock a sliding glass door.

Fabris, making as much noise as he could, walked around the house, into the dark back yard. He saw nothing at first in his flashlight beam.

Suddenly a head popped around the house’s corner. Fabris ordered the man to come into the clear, which he did--holding a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol in his upraised hand, Fabris said.

Pointing his own pistol at the suspect, Fabris calmly ordered him to drop the gun. Instead, the suspect leveled the gun at Fabris.

The deputy twice more ordered the man to drop it, in both English and Spanish. But when the man moved toward the deputy, Fabris shot once, wounding him. The man still clinged to his gun and walked toward Fabris. The deputy shot again. This time the man fell. He died later in a local hospital.

Fabris spent the next six hours filling out reports, going over the events with district attorney’s investigators and taking blood and powder-residue tests.

He did not know then that the man had died. When Fabris learned that, he went to church, seeking counsel with his pastor. “He had a lot of good things to say to me,” he said. “He made sense.”

Fabris said he is now more aware that violence is always a possibility: “I think about it. I don’t lose sleep anymore, but I still think about it.”

Recipients of the Medal of Courage were deputies Robert Stevenson, Derek Franklin and Sgt. Daniel Jarvis. The Medal of Merit was awarded to Deputy John Gentile, Lt. Tom Davis, Sgt. Stanley Kincade, senior criminalist John Hartmann and investigators Timothy Carney, Julie Kearns, Thomas Mandala and Janet Strong.

No one earned the council’s fourth yearly award, the Purple Heart. “We’re glad we didn’t have to give one away,” Bean said.